You set your holiday budget and worry about the add ons, no need, you can sail on board any of our vessel and spend diddly squat. OK when you are on some of our vessels you can buy a drink and T-shirt but that’s about it. Great value - great fun!

Green Tourism and Awards

Sailing gifts

Gifts

Remote Islands - sailing destination

Remote Islands Isolated Communities

"If you fantasise about a Robinson Crusoe experience on a desert island or just like quirky, resilient island communities then this is definitely the website to get you there in true explorer style." Travel writer Fiona Smythe, 17th June 2013

Arrive with Achievement

Your first step ashore is one of achievement, you helped get yourself there, and now you are being rewarded for your effort. It’s not like you sat in squashed up seat in a metal tube jetting through the sky and eating plastic food. This is slow travel, relaxing travel, active travel, social travel and rewarding travel all wrapped into one. When you arrive there is so much to take in, trying to understand how these places survive, how they cope with isolation and tiny communities. Stretching your legs on land again, finding the interesting places and enjoying the excitement of meeting new people.

Most years we have over 250 remote islands in our voyage itineraries but they are forever changing.

Small Islands Small Boats

Our smaller pilot cutters have always featured island hopping rather than marina hopping. Wildlife seems to be more prolific on islands so many of our voyages seek out far outposts for unspoilt nature and curious creatures.

Know the Name now Know the Place.

UK and Europe

I expect you will have heard of St Kilda and the Isles of Scilly but now you can get to them and think on these. Shiants, Rum, Eigg and Canna in Scotland. Bryher, St Martins and Gannily in the Isles of Scilly. Ushant, , St Maudetus and Isle de Brehat in Brittany. Plus the Orkeneys, Shetlands, Channel Islands, Skomer. The Farne Islands and Lindisfarne in the NE of England

Tall Ships

The trade wind routes our tall ships follow often involve big ocean crossings where any inhabited island with an anchorage is a ‘jewel’ to be cherished because you are made so welcome by the local inhabitants....

World Wide Islands

South Shetlands, Signy in the South Orkneys, South Georgia, Tristan da Cunah, Ascension, Mederioa, the Canary Islands, Cape Verde, Bahamas, Bermuda, Antigua, Azores and so it goes on and on.

Isolated Communities that welcome you. These are places you mostly can’t fly to, they get the occasional supply ship and the odd cruise ship but a tall ship really is special.

Classic Sailing Wager:

Who can visit the most remote islands?

It started with a wager amongst friends, but it has become a bit of an obsession. Classic Sailing charter skippers Adam and Debbie versus the Merchant Navy – represented by our friend Kirsty. The competition was: Which of us could visit the most obscure, remote islands in the world?

Debbie was quite proud of her Tristan Da Cuhna passport stamp after waiting 3 days for the swell to die down enough to land in 2007. Adam counts circumnavigating the island of Cape Horn on tall ship Europa in 2010 but Kirsty now has a shiny new Master Mariner ticket so does this mean she can take unfair little de-tours on her Maersk tanker ?

Adam and Debbie have since visited Coronation Island and Signy Island in the South Orkneys. Paulet Island, Dundee Island and Devils Island on the east of the Antarctica Peninsula, and on the Western side of Antarctic Peninsula and South Shetland - Astralabe Island, Decep[tion Island, Half Moon Island and Aictcho or Barrientos Islands.

Debbie has landed on Bjorn Islands in Scorsby Sund, Greenland in 2013.

'Atlas of Remote Islands' by Judith Schalansky

This beautiful and subversive little book of maps was a present from Kirsty and has revitalised our remote islands competition. On the cover it lays down the gauntlet “Fifty Islands I have never visited and never will.” Well, YOU CAN and WE HAVE...or at least about 7 of them!

Tell us about your Island Quests

If you manage to visit a remote island you think we should visit, please e mail us and we'll add you to our Classic Sailing Remote Islands Wager Page.

If you find one that looks impossible to reach by conventional travel let us know your island quest and we'll add it to our wish list. Who knows, one of our skippers might just dream up a future voyage that could pass by your island quest.